40
Alicante to Calpe
Our destination is Calpe, 34 miles along the coast, chosen as a convenient jumping off point for The Balearics. There is a light wind, a choppy sea and bright sunshine. At around three o’clock we are sailing parallel with the coast and about three miles off when, after miles and miles of a hazy green and brown shoreline, a strange white patch appears in the distance as if all colour has been bleached from the land. As we get closer, and with the help of binoculars, it looks like several miles of huge broken teeth. Sometimes at sea your brain simply cannot make sense of what your eyes have in front of them and you say, ‘What am I looking at?’ and sometimes neither of you has a clue and you just have to wait until you get closer. David is at the chart table, however.
‘What is that?’ I call to him.
‘Benidorm,’ he calls back.
I fiddle with the focus on the binoculars, screw up my eyes and realise that what I am looking at are multi-storey hotels and apartment blocks.
There was an episode of Star Trek, in the seventies from memory, in which the Star Ship Enterprise visits a planet so overwhelmed by its own population that when the ship’s crew looks out through its portholes all they see is an endless slow-moving mass of people wedged shoulder-to-shoulder. I find myself wondering what would happen if all the guests at Benidorm decided to leave their rooms and go out onto the beach at the same time. Would there be room for them all to stand on it, even shoulder-to-shoulder? In the 1960s Benidorm was still a village and the beach was where the men carried their boats after a day’s fishing. Tourism makes a lot of changes.
The marina at Calpe is monumentally crowded and rather confusing. We just keep plodding slowly into it and after a while up pops the Swede from Alicante, just his head and shoulders, waving to us, his boat invisible behind a mass of others.
‘Seen the waiting pontoon?’ I shout.
He points to another huddle of masts and somewhere in the middle of them we find a pontoon with a notice on it saying ‘Visitors Pontoon’ and what looks to be an imperative to ‘Await Attention!’ in Spanish. I am just tying up when a long-haired malcontent arrives waving his arms saying we can’t stay. I am unsure whether he means at the waiting pontoon or in the marina generally. I just say one night please and after mouthing off for a while he points vaguely in one direction and disappears in another. I untie us, climb back on board and we set off in the direction he has indicated.
We finally find him standing on the quay. Then begins an undignified performance.
‘Bows on?’ I signal to the malcontent. ‘Or side on?’
Side on, his irritated arm signals inform me, and he is standing resolutely where a marina attendant would stand if we were going to tie up sideways on to a quay. I ask again, to be sure that is what he wants. He screws up his mouth and shoots his arms to his feet in a way that now says, Bows on! I tell David and he abandons a rather nice approach in a very restricted space, reverses and re-aligns himself to tie up bows on.
No! the man signals manically, side on! I throw the rope and let him get on with it. Only he doesn’t. He merely catches it, drops it onto the quay and walks off. Because of the angle we have ended up at, plus an offshore wind, it becomes rather difficult. We are just hauling her in as best we can when I look up from the bow to see a pulpit and anchor nosing under our ensign and about to hit our cockpit combing. A 40-ft mono, without power, is being pushed by a small boat whose driver is looking in the opposite direction to the one he is travelling in and whose owner stands over the pulpit with that annoying look of people with large overhanging pulpits that says, ‘I’d like to do something, but as you can see I can’t reach your boat to fend off, and from experience your boat will be the one to get damaged so I’m OK.’
With David yelling at me to tie on the bow rope I drop it instead, scramble on board and grab the importunate pulpit. I can’t push it backwards because the small boat is driving it forward with more force than I possess so I shove it sideways and the rest of the boat follows down our starboard side without damaging anything. David says the pulpit wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t abandoned the bow rope and allowed Voyager to get blown away from the quay and, still struggling to tie up Voyager in a rising offshore wind, we have a brief but unseemly row on the quay. The woman running the office comes out to watch. I don’t like Calpe.
David goes to the office to pay. Its door and windows are all tightly closed and it is like a sauna inside. The German yachtsman in front of him has forgotten his reading glasses, so filling in the form takes a long time, and then the man’s credit card won’t work. By the time he returns, having been charged £14 for the night with no power or water, David isn’t keen on Calpe either.
Meanwhile the Swedish kid is out in his dinghy producing a wash and filling the air with petrol fumes. At least being tied up side-on to the quay we’ve no lazy line to bother about, and we couldn’t be more sheltered, tucked in under the huge rocky outcrop called Peñón de Ifach which forms the tip of the headland, and is shaped like a miniature Gibraltar. In fact, Calpe is the name the Greeks gave to Gibraltar.
After dinner we have a wander round the marina and an ice cream on a stick before bed. The showers are nice, although the door to the block – which is only yards from a public road – doesn’t close let alone lock, making the security key redundant. The shower cubicle doors are of the Wild West saloon type and, given the unlockable entrance, leave one feeling somewhat vulnerable.
The seagulls here are given to huge belly laughs. But apart from that it is a quiet night until the fishing fleet begins unloading its catch at 4.30am, just before a party of carousing Germans returns from the bar. Still wide awake long after they have settled into their bunks, and with the noise in our hull destroying any chance of going back to sleep, I reach for a free sailing newspaper we’ve picked up somewhere, to take my mind off night thoughts about rats.
There is an article in it about a single sailor who, driven almost to the point of madness by rodent activity in his boat, dismantles over a period of days everything that can be dismantled to locate and dispose of the infestation. On finding that the scuffling and scratching is still there, and now close to certifiable, he is found by a fellow-sailor one evening with an inspection lamp and an electric saw, about to carve through those areas of a boat’s timbers which should never be breached while a vessel is still in the water. After listening to his ravings for a while, the Good Samaritan prizes the electric saw from the man’s fevered hands and leads him and his inspection lamp up from the devastated bowels of his boat and out onto the pontoon. Once there, he aims the beam of the inspection lamp just below the boat’s water line – at the fish energetically nibbling at the marine growth on the bottom of the demented man’s hull.
I take our big yellow torch outside and shine it down into the dark water. The shoal of grey mullet enjoying an early breakfast off our own hull barely gives me a glance.
Next morning the marina’s touch-screen computerized info system fails to respond to David’s touch, but after waiting through a series of videos he does finally get a weather forecast. Then with great panache he reverses out of the berth that caused us so much strife to get into last night, which is usually the way when there is nobody messing you about. We have main and genoa out plus both engines to enable us to reach our destination in daylight. It is a roly poly sea again like yesterday.
THE BALEARIC ISLANDS
41
Calpe to Ibiza
The towering Sierra Nevada Mountains that dominate southern Spain – along with several lesser mountain ranges – do not end at the coast but continue out into the Mediterranean Sea where their exposed peaks form what are today called by English-speakers The Balearic Islands. In the official Catalan they are called Illes Balears; in Spanish Islas Baleares. The Romans gave this group of islands the name Insulae Baleares, possibly derived from the Phoenician term for islanders resisting attack with stones and slingshots. There are four main is
lands. In descending order of size they are Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera. We are currently heading for Ibiza.
Around 11am David and a small container ship en route for Alicante make way for each other, after which its skipper calls David on the VHF for a chat and signs off by wishing us a safe journey. Lunch is soft white bread and gazpacho soup.
At 4pm a tiny green finch lands on the main outhaul. Even powerful seabirds sometimes become tired when battling overlong against strong winds or adverse weather. This is a very small bird which should really be in a tree somewhere sheltered. Even so, it exhibits the same instinct for survival and sea-savvy as any seabird ten times its size. When exhausted at sea, birds seek out the nearest vessel and then perch on it until they feel strong enough to fly again.
The tiny green finch takes a walk under our doghouse roof but disturbed by our presence it flies down the length of the cockpit to the dinghy, as far away from us as it can get. It perches on one of the davits for a minute or two, but with 17 knots of wind buffeting its soft green feathers and all but dragging its tiny, needle-thin feet from the shiny stainless-steel, it quickly returns to the shelter of the doghouse and perches inches from us on the top edge of one of the open companionway doors. Aware of our little guest’s dilemma we sit quietly, so as not to cause it undue stress. When it has had the rest it needs it swoops off astern. The island of Ibiza has become visible, looking like a large jagged tooth.
At 6pm, within range of Ibiza, the GPS quits. We have begun to wonder if it suffers from stage fright. Just when you need it to perform it goes all bashful.
When planning our time of arrival we had failed to allow for the fact that we are travelling east and that the sun sinks earlier. We arrive in Sant Antoni’s harbour at 7.15 in a stunning sunset. By the time we have anchored it is dark. It is a joy to anchor again, to have a cold bottle of wine open and dinner started within minutes of arriving; instead of putting out fenders and ropes, tying up to a waiting pontoon, waiting to be allocated a berth, untying again and moving to the berth, tying up again, re-adjusting all the fenders and putting on springs, then a long trudge to a hot office to fill in forms and pay. To simply drop the anchor is bliss. And of course it is free.
A little way down the beach from us is the hotel where we stayed on a holiday here nearly twenty years ago. We may have changed but the hotel doesn’t seem to have. It still has the little straw umbrellas over the tiny tables you put your drinks on, and the beach huts near the outside shower where you can change after your swim in the sea.
The sea tonight is like a millpond. There is a fair on the quay, but very little sound, and two very tall, illuminated, inverted Vs which we assume must be municipal sculpture or something. They turn out to be supports for what seems at this distance to be a communal bungee. After dinner we see the first cage full of holiday-makers hurtle up and down between them, flying way above the pinnacles of the two Vs. It looks horrendous. There is a long delay between launches. David reckons this is while they hose out the cage. I don’t want to contemplate this so soon after eating. There do seem to be more people watching than participating, however, which must be counter-productive as far as the operators are concerned because quite soon nobody gets into the cage at all.
It is a very quiet, still night. The fishermen, the ferry boats and Sant Antoni’s infamous revellers are a long way away.
It is a cold, damp morning. The rope on one of the davits slips as we are lowering the dinghy. I sprint down the back steps and support the outboard before it can go under water. I find my responses much improved of late. I also squabble less with ropes and knots. We sort out the dinghy and motor into the marina. The chandler here carries exactly the sort of cruising guide we want for The Balearics, in English, and also provides directions to the supermarket.
The streets are deserted apart from one young man who looks as if he was one of last night’s revellers and should not yet be abroad. He is pale, with drooping eyelids and the kind of cough that a long night of heavy smoking and drinking produces. He totters from his doorway into a car and drives away.
We turn too soon for the supermarket and end up in something that is half bar and half small corner shop. The barman has that wistful, other-worldly look of someone who has been up all night and whose thoughts are longingly directed towards his bed. His half-dozen customers, at separate tables and each drooping over a glass, look like characters from Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Iceman Cometh, who spend all their days in a bar room because they cannot face life in the outside world.
These young men sit silently, gazing into their drinks and we wonder if the products on the shelves are really there for them – orange juice, milk, breakfast cereals and snacks – so that they have no need to leave until the clubs open for business again. Erupting among them like this seems a little like intruding on private grief and we leave quietly without buying anything.
We find the real supermarket eventually and while David heads for the shelves to do the bulk of the shopping I join the queue at the meat counter. I am second in line, and only want some breast of chicken for a pasta dish, but the man in front has a brochure of the week’s specials in one hand, and an elderly woman’s elbow in the other. He is filling his mom’s freezer for her.
The butcher is slicing half a sheep into wafer-thin chops, cutlets and roasts while the customer talks to him. Unfortunately, every time an answer is required of him, the butcher stops cutting, turns around, makes his leisurely reply and then returns to his chopping block. After he’s wrapped the lamb cuts into little parcels, tied them with tape, till-rolled and poly-bagged them, he starts on the pork specials. When these have all been neatly wrapped, he lays waste to the trays of chicken.
When my turn comes the only piece of chicken left is a large leg with a long if scrupulously clean yellow foot on it. I am weary and my back aches. I have been standing too long. I fear that if I ask for breast meat the butcher will disappear through the two large stainless steel doors of his freezer and return a short lifetime later carrying great bins of meat and begin totally restocking his massive counter before he gets around to serving me. It has happened before. So I point to the solitary leg. He weighs it, then holding it aloft with one hand asks with a cutting motion of the other if I want the foot removed. I shake my head. I just want it gift-wrapped and handed over so that I can go. I leave the parcel with David at the till and totter out to sit on a wall in the sunshine until he emerges with it, along with bread and milk, wine and fat red grapes, fresh fish and picture postcards.
We weigh anchor at noon. The day is hot and sunny. There is little wind and what there is blows straight on the nose, so we motor. With no other boats around and not another soul in sight it is also a day for abandoning clothes. We put up the awning and our feet. It is bliss. The coastline here is sheer and the water deep so you can sail very close to the cliffs. The rock formations are fascinating, the pine forests are a lush green and it is all very beautiful. We have a lovely, leisurely, scenic trip in utter solitude, for it is estimated that Ibiza’s half a million annual visitors are largely concentrated in half a square mile, mostly around the Sant Antoni night club district. The rest of the island is largely deserted, with lots of empty bays to swim and laze in.
Mid-afternoon we anchor in one of them, Clot d’es Llamp, a small bay on the north-east coast. The water is so clear that you can see the sandy waves on the bottom six metres down. Like much of Ibiza, this little bay has a fascinating geology. You find yourself just gazing at the cliff face, following with your eyes the great curves and sweeps of different colours and textures, and trying to imagine the tumultuous primeval eruptions that created them.
Another nice thing about being at anchor is that, except when opposed by a stronger current, an anchored boat will always point into the wind, however slight. Voyager’s opening bow windows take full advantage of this. We open them now, and her other ten hatches, and a cooling breeze circulates through the boat and out into the cockpit, dissipating the
afternoon heat. The sea is lapping on the rocks. Everything is switched off, including us. It is time for a glass of something cool and refreshing.
The sun disappears behind the cliffs by five o’clock creating a delightful early evening, shady but warm. We listen to World Service news while dinner cooks: Chile’s General Pinochet has been arrested in London; there are 250mph winds in India and a typhoon is heading for Japan.
To our left there is a most un-fort-like little fort overlooking the sea, with big windows and impossible to defend. David reckons its garrison must have spent a lot of time practicing surrender drill – Our flag down, two three – wait for it, wait for it – white flag up, two, three. The water remains aquamarine until dark. It is a fantastically starry night. Orion is positively glowing in the northern sky, very close and very bright.
Later, as we resume gazing up at it through the hatch above our bunk, and drowsiness begins to overtake us, David wonders if the tiny green finch we had on board earlier in the day made it safely back to land. I listen to the furtive buzzing near my right ear and wonder how it is that mosquitoes know so precisely the very moment you are about to fall asleep.
42
Ibiza to Mallorca
When we leave the anchorage at 7.30 next morning there is still a tiny sliver of bright moon. The water is so clear that even in the dawn light you can see the anchor rising from the seabed. There is a particularly beautiful sunrise at 8.15. It is not just the return of the sun that is so captivating but the way everything around you changes from a chilly grey-blue with a hard edge to warmth, colour and soft contours. The sea takes on a pink sheen this morning and two dolphins come to bask in our bow wave. We go up front to keep them company. We invariably will, on all our journeys, except in bad weather or on solitary night watches. It seems discourteous not to.
Dolphins Under My Bed Page 23